Endgame
by MyLadyScribbler
Summary: Following the events of "Broken Bird," Ducky is still grappling with the psychological fallout from his encounter with Marcin Jerek, "Mr. Pain." The night before he is to testify at that man's war crimes tribunal in Europe, Ducky dreams that he comes face-to-face with Jerek for one final game of chess.
1. Check

Ducky carefully maneuvered his right arm into the sleeve of the thermal knit top and pulled it the rest of the way over his head.

He'd forgone his usual pajama jacket – and most other items of clothing that had buttons on them, for that matter – until his hand was completely healed.

 _If his hand completely healed,_ he thought with a mild feeling of dread.

Behind him, on the wardrobe, hung the dark charcoal gray pinstripe suit he'd selected for the next day. Below it sat his black oxfords, freshly polished.

Outside the hotel room window, he could see the lights of the city twinkling in the misty early April night.

The city known as Den Haag, The Hague.

Where Ducky was to testify as a witness in a tribunal against one Marcin Jerek, alias "Mr. Pain."

"You're not going, Duck!" Gibbs had yelled when Ducky came into the NCIS bullpen, the official letter from the International Criminal Court in his hand.

Oh, they'd argued long and hard about that.

In the end, Gibbs had relented. But he'd insisted that Ziva go with Ducky to keep an eye on him.

Ziva was in the room next door, sawing logs rather energetically from the sounds of things – and of course if you mentioned it to her you'd get a broken jaw, if you were lucky.

Ducky envied her. Ever since that day in the Embassy of Afghanistan - since the stabbing, for that matter - he'd dreaded closing his eyes at night. That was when it all came back.

 _The crying and moans in the medical tent. The screams that he always seemed to hear coming from a certain room in the camp – a room that he later learned was known as Mr. Pain's "special room."_

 _Javid clutching Ducky's hand as the morphine took effect._

Ducky climbed into bed and tried to distract himself with a book he'd brought along. But in the end he set the book on the night table, turned off the lamp and lay back on the pillows.

The voices started, right on cue.

 _"How many did you save, Dr. Mallard, and how many did you take?"_

 _"Bringer of death…"_

 _"This tribunal now calls Dr. Donald P. Mallard, formerly of the United Kingdom's Royal Army Medical Corps..."_

 _"Javid wasn't your victim…he was your weapon!"_

 _"I used a boy…to break a man."_

 _"Bringer of death…"_

He was walking down a long, dimly lit corridor with a cement floor, each of his footsteps echoing off the walls.

The air had a musty, mildewed sort of smell to it. And beneath it, Ducky could detect other smells, like sweat, and a familiar metallic odor he'd come to know very well: blood.

Fear. Agony.

Death.

He looked down at himself. He was wearing his usual shirt, slacks, suit jacket and bowtie.

His outfit suddenly transformed into his olive-drab RAMC fatigues, doctor's white coat and boots, and a set of dog tags clinked against his chest as he walked.

His right hand was still in its bandages, though.

He came to a battered wooden door that swung open as he approached.

"Enter," a voice inside said.

He did, and he found himself in a room, cement-floored and dimly lit just like the hallway. It was the "special room;" he recognized it from the CIA filmstrip.

It was devoid of furniture save for one splintery wooden table and two chairs in the very middle of the room. A naked light bulb hung overhead, illuminating the table and chairs in a spotlight.

Jerek sat in one of the chairs, watching Ducky as he stood in the doorway. He looked as he did that day in the embassy, a withered, bearded old man whose wounded eye had healed to a grotesque scar.

"Come closer, Dr. Mallard, don't be shy."

Ducky slowly walked further into the room. As he did, he was aware of a flickering noise.

In the shadows, he could see Trent Kort fiddling with the controls of an old handheld film camera set on top of a stack of crates.

Trent looked up from the camera and gave Ducky a look of thinly-disguised disdain before starting the camera and disappearing.

Ducky came to stand behind the unoccupied chair. He and Jerek just stared at each other for a long moment.

"Sit."

He didn't want to. But Ducky pulled the chair out from the table – wincing at the shrieking noise the chair legs made against the floor – and sat down.

Jerek tapped his fingers together. "You left in the middle of our last game, as I recall," he said mildly. "A pity – you were a formidable opponent. And that move you had me trapped in…you recall, of course?"

Ducky swallowed. "The knight-bishop fork. Two more moves and there would have been a checkmate."

"So there would have been. But which one of us, young Ducky, which one?"

"Why did you bring me here?" Ducky demanded.

Jerek gave an impassive wave of his hand. "What else? For a game of chess."

A chess set instantly appeared in the middle of the table. It was a handsome set indeed, with richly carved pieces and a board with intricate inlays, all made from highly polished wood. The white pieces were on Jerek's side of the board, and the black ones were on Ducky's.

Ducky picked up one of the knights – the horse's head seemed to be glaring at him with its flared nostrils and wild eyes. He set it down and picked up one of the bishops. "You know, the bishop was added to the game when chess was introduced in Europe, but in ancient India and Persia, that piece was the elephant."

And right as he said so, the chess piece in his fingers suddenly changed into an elephant. A battered plush one with button eyes.

Ducky gasped.

 _It belonged to Marjan, the little girl he'd been treating for pneumonia only a few weeks before everything that happened with Javid._

 _One night, he'd found the elephant lying on the ground next to Marjan's bed in the medical tent, and he'd tucked it back under her arm without waking her._

The elephant in his hand changed back into a bishop, and Ducky quickly put it back on the board.

"Yes…" Jerek said quietly. "It is amazing how a simple chess set can stand for so many things. Memories…intrigues…a struggle for power." He sat up straight. "And now, Ducky, we play."


	2. Mate

Jerek reached out, took a white pawn and moved it two spaces forward.

Ducky took a deep breath and performed the same move with one of his own.

For a while, the only sounds were of chess pieces softly clicking against the board, and the flicker of Trent's camera.

It was Jerek who made the first capture. His hand shot out, captured Ducky's pawn and shot back, like a scorpion retreating into a burrow with its prey.

Minutes later, Ducky did the same, taking out a pawn with a rook.

"I sacrifice the one for the lives of others," Jerek murmured dreamily.

As he contemplated one particularly tricky move, Ducky looked up and saw Tony walking by, munching on a bag of popcorn. He waved cheerfully at Ducky and then went to stand next to Trent's camera.

Ziva walked up behind Jerek and gave Ducky a look that said, "Say the word and I'll slit his throat."

Ducky gave a slight shake of his head. _Tempting, but no thank you._ Ziva shrugged and vanished back into the shadows.

Ducky became aware of more people walking into and out of the room, watching the game. The Afghan ambassador. McGee, holding a book on game theory. Abby, wearing a black-and-white checkered coat with chess piece earrings dangling from her ears. Vance, with a personnel file in his hands.

And Gibbs, standing in the corner with arms folded over his chest, watching as if this was just another interrogation session back at NCIS headquarters.

The game got progressively deadlier, with pieces disappearing from both sides of the board. Ducky had always prided himself on being an expert chess player, but the ruthlessness of this game unnerved him.

"How many will you save, Dr. Mallard, and how many will you take?" Jerek kept asking.

Ducky tried to ignore him, and just concentrated on capturing pieces and keeping his king out of check.

His hand twinged painfully, and he rubbed at it.

"Your hand still plagues you. Javid's dear baby sister certainly has skill with a knife."

Mosuma Daoub appeared and walked slowly around them, wearing her florist's apron over her clothes and carrying a pot of chrysanthemums.

By the last moments of the game, both sides had suffered heavy losses, but Jerek's pieces still outnumbered Ducky's.

Jerek suddenly looked at Ducky's queen, a thoughtful look on his face. "Who is your queen, Ducky? Is it the lovely Jordan? Or do you still pine, as I suspect, for the radiant Maggie? You certainly left young Angus with quite a dentist's bill."

 _Stop it,_ Ducky thought, his hands trembling. _Stop it!_

"And what of your other family? Is the mallard still mourning a lost duckling from all those years ago?" Jerek's hand shot forward and captured one of Ducky's rooks. "I speak, of course, of dear little brother Nicholas."

"How dare you bring my brother into this!" Ducky yelled, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

"How do I not dare! In my profession, Ducky, anything is fair game!" Jerek gripped the edges of the table as he stood up and glared down at Ducky. "I know everything about you…I watched you as you made your rounds in the medical tents, talked to the other doctors, wrote letters home. I found out your strengths…and your weaknesses. And that's how I knew to use Javid. A boy, to break a man. A pawn, to capture a knight."

Jerek smirked as he sat back down, taking in the stricken look in Ducky's eyes. "Yes. That is exactly how you saw yourself, my dear Dr. Mallard – the knight in shining armor, riding in to save the day. And that desire to save the day is what has caused you untold misery and heartache."

He stopped for a moment to let these words sink into Ducky. "And now I believe it is your move."

Ducky stared helplessly at the remaining pieces on the board, fresh waves of guilt and grief washing over him. Threatening to drown him.

"What did you tell me, Duck?" Gibbs called from where he stood in the corner.

"Jethro?"

"You told me yourself. What did you find out while you were doing his physical?" Gibbs prompted.

Remembrance dawned in Ducky's eyes.

Gibbs grinned and disappeared into the shadows.

"Dr. Mallard…" a voice whispered as Ducky felt a hand - no, two hands - on his right shoulder.

He looked up. It was Javid and Mosuma.

"Ducky…" Another two hands came to rest on his left. Jordan's, and Mr. Palmer's.

Ducky moved one of his remaining pawns down to the eighth rank, the very last row.

A promotion.

"Which piece should you like to promote?" Jerek asked.

Ducky thought for a moment, studying where each of Jerek's pieces were on the board.

"I would like my knight back," he said finally.

It wasn't the usual thing – players usually got their queen back on the board, or even brought in a second queen. But Jerek shrugged and handed the knight to Ducky, who put it in the place of his pawn.

"I remember, Marcin, discovering during your physical that you have a congenital immunity to pain," Ducky said as Jerek made his next move.

"This is not news, Ducky. Not to either of us or anyone else."

"No, it isn't. But…what it told me was that it meant you couldn't tell when you'd gone wrong." Ducky's voice took on an edge. _"When you'd gone too far."_

With that, he moved his knight two squares down and one over, and he looked Marcin Jerek, Mr. Pain, square in the eye.

"Checkmate."

Everyone else in the room vanished, leaving Ducky and Jerek alone with the game board.

The two men pushed back from the table and stood up, facing each other but making no attempt to shake hands. Jerek's jaw was quivering with barely suppressed rage.

A rumbling noise could be heard, somewhere off in the distance. "Whoa, sandstorm coming. Batten down the hatches," Abby's voice said.

A sandstorm did blow into the room – a sirocco. It sent Trent's camera crashing to the floor and blasted everything in the room with needle-sharp grains of sand.

Ducky held up his arms in front of his face to shield it from the sand as the sirocco bore down on them, sending chess pieces and board whirling into the air.

Jerek remained standing, still gripping the edges of the table – and to Ducky's amazement, he started to fade away in the sandstorm.

"The king is dead," Jerek hissed, his voice eerily magnified and distorted.

Ducky gasped as his eyes snapped open, his heart racing. He was staring up at the ceiling over his bed, as dawn started to appear on the horizon outside his window.

There came a loud pounding on the door. "Ducky! Ducky, shine and rise!" More pounding.

"The term is rise and shine, Ziva!" Ducky called. "I'll be up in a minute – and stop that pounding or you'll wake the entire hotel!"

Ziva's footsteps died away down the hall. Ducky returned his gaze to the ceiling, Jerek's final words echoing in his ears.

 _The king is dead._

"Long live the king," Ducky whispered.


End file.
